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Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

I used to think GitHub Codespaces would help popularise Gitpod but now realize it is the other way around. Gitpod is currently permitted to exist in the Visual Studio Code ecosystem to popularise GitHub Codespaces, and Microsoft can step in at any moment to create legal crises that strategically divide the market from a business perspective because, like Apple and their AppStore: it is their ecosystem that they control and they are in absolute control.

$Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture$

In this blog post, we explore the ecosystem of open-source forks, revisit the story so far with how Microsoft has been transforming from products to services, go deep into why the Visual Studio Code ecosystem is designed to fracture, and the legal implications of this design then discuss future problems faced by the software development ecosystem if our industry continues as-is on the current path...

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Stefh

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I did not understand anything

Lucky

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Vscode is beginning it's enshittification cycle. They got everyone using it, now they start locking it down. Much of the fear is what Microsoft could do, not so much what they have done so far

The C# extension going proprietary is the smoke to the coming fire though, and highlights what could happen to other languages. The new extension cannot be installed on open source redistributions like vscodium. What happens now if the typescript extension gets a similar update? Or Python? Etc.

They've made it so technically anyone can spin off their own extensions marketplace, and attempt to make their own C#/typescript/Python extensions, but can they truly compete with Microsoft? That is the fracture the author is talking about. They've effectively made a walled garden out of an open source platform, they've just been playing nice to hook devs and companies in before the slow enshittification

jeffhykin

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"Its MIT open source and anyone can use it!"

But Microsoft only publishes a not-MIT licensed one
And if you DONT use that one, the extension store created by microsoft wont work
And even if you make your own extension store (which people did for VS Codium) you legally wont be allowed to use any of the de-facto quality of life extensions (Python, SSH, Docker, C#, C++, Live Share, etc)
And those extensions default to needing fully-closed-source tools develped by microsoft
AND, unlike Chromium, anything that tries to fork and build on top of VS Code, (e.g. gitpod; a web-based dev environment) will die because none of the de-facto/core/quality-of-life extensions people are used to will be available. They'll have to use the Microsoft alternative (e.g. Github workspaces)

The MIT codebase is just bait

eluvatar

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I think when it becomes a problem it won't be hard for the community to build their own extensions that can be used anywhere. It doesn't hurt right now so that work hasn't been done yet.

jeffhykin

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Will it ever hurt though? Its designed to make GitPod just feel uncomfortable while making VS Code feels good.